Glen Donaldson – Bindweed Magazine

Would the Real Maxine Miller Please Wake Up?

Around the age of fifteen, Maxine Miller had taken a long hard look around her and said, “Nope, not for me.” The entitled private school girl with the perfectly pressed uniform and a liking for colorful hair bands began to carry herself from that time forward like some imagined liquid tub of gold. In the process she became remarkably good at fantasizing.

The arid world of grammar lessons and Algebra II were like being on a planet with very little gravity for young Maxine. The endless classroom days stretched before her like a prairie road into a horizon she couldn’t be bothered to walk. Her thoughts would drift and soar amongst the clouds even as the school bell sounded around her. Maxine Miller was the daydreamer who never got her work done but wasn’t lit or Gucci enough, as the cool kids said, for that to be seen as a positive trait.

But come the night, the drabness of her days would be burned away and the carousel of her deliberately fantasizing thoughts brought to a halting stop by the oblivion of sleep. In a house she shared with parents who were always on the phone, night’s rest was when her subconscious would go into swirling, beautiful freefall and create her imagination’s true magnum opus.

At these times freckle-faced Maxine Miller, she of the tight smile and blue-rimmed glasses, would transform into adored best-selling author Caprice Crawford. The dream, repeated night after night, was always the same. A woman from the publishing company appeared and would announce that Ms Crawford, whose reputation positively rippled around the world as one of the genuine superstars of the modern literati, was finally about to make an appearance. The orchestra would start to play and on cue all conversation amongst the champagne-sipping guests ceased. All eyes would be directed towards the top of the stairs. Stunning and uber intelligent, Caprice Crawford, with her delicate chin and piercing eyes of green, would begin her slow and graceful descent, sliding her left white-gloved hand along the dark, lacquered staircase banister as she went.

The star-struck crowd knows that soon she will be among them and that maybe this literary god made flesh might have coffee and cake and talk with them. Some of the assembled make a mental note to try to say something meaningful that would make captivating Caprice notice them and think they are interesting. “What does it matter if she doesn’t remember our name a minute later?” a few ask themselves rhetorically. “Perhaps some part of us will remain in her mind? Perhaps even some piece of ourselves will find its way into her next book?” Oh the joy! Oh the splendor! Oh the anticipation!

And oh the heartache when pigtails and braces fifteen year old Maxine Miller awakens the next morning only to have to confront the stark reality that Caprice Crawford is not real and is most certainly not her. The gateway between Maxine’s worlds of fantasy and reality has been abruptly sealed shut. The door was locked. To that otherworldly realm, it always had been, and, unbeknownst to her now and for reasons too involved to untangle, always would be.

Somehow sensing this, Maxine does what she did most mornings when emerging from the twilight of the dream half-remembered. She laughed. Heartily. Musically. And in spite of herself. It was like yoga for her overworked, let-down synapses; a handy sanity-saving act of clear thinking. She had done it many times before. It felt familiar. Restoring balance quickly was her survival mechanism kicking in. It was very Maxine. It was not at all like the over-successful, puffed up la-de-da Caprice Crawford Maxine had invented. And the true beauty and magically helpful insight of that was something the awkward teenage would grow to love and appreciate in the fullness of time.

Glen Donaldson wishes people had a brightness setting and longs to elevate small talk to medium talk.

He has had work published by Jotters United, Positive Words Magazine, GhostStory.com, Tiny Owl Publishing, 101 Fiction, Tokyo Voice Column, Ipswich Life Magazine, Australian Writers Center, Lend Me Your Literacy, Into the Void Magazine, Fictuary, Octavius Magazine, Ether Books, The Binnacle, DesiWriters, The Flash Fiction Press,Cadillac Cicatrix, 81 Words, Wattpad and QWeekend magazine.

He is forthcoming in The Bombay Review and Horror After Dark.

Falling Like Dominos

The senate inquiry into the reasons why pizza had been legislatively classified as a vegetable had been flawed from the beginning. In this part of the country, everyone knew that corruption was synonymous with government. As Shakespeare had written centuries before, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” When Alfonso ‘The Moth’ Esposito III – known equally for his frequent fashion faux pas (super deep v-neck shirts, Disney character ties, square toed dress shoes, unibrow) as he was for being the 29 year old President and CEO of tomato paste giant Grupo Bimbo Foods – was revealed as one of the five people appointed to the government commission tasked with unearthing the suspected murky deals that had led to the distrustfully leveraged ruling, many immediately suspected a dough-coloured whitewash.

In truth, among The Moth’s conglomerate of food manufacturing firms was a company that acted as the chief supplier of pasta sauce pizza bases to school tuckshops along the entire East Coast. It was therefore rightly seen that Esposito had much to gain by the FDA’s reclassification and anointing of pizza as a nutritionally sound food staple considered suitable for serving on school premises to the nation’s growing children.

Grupo Bimbo was long suspected to have had links with the La Cosa Nostra chapter of the

Sicilian mafia. It was certainly no stranger to allegations of misconduct and using bribes and kickbacks to help secure government and private sector supply contracts and favours. In the 1930’s the company had reinvented bread as a variation on the marshmallow and named it ‘Submarino’, (later to become known as ‘Twinkies’) effectively sidestepping government agency food laws at the time which prevented nutritional tampering with provisions deemed primary food products.

More recently the shady corporate had come under the glare of official scrutiny when their

popular ‘diet pizza’ was found to contain toppings that included ear wax and bellybutton lint. They’d also been held to account by no less than NASA (National Advertising Standards Association) for misleading promotion of their $12.95 gluten free pizza (gluten being a protein composite found in barley, rye, wheat and all their hybrids). The company had been forced to clarify that the gluten component of the pizza was included at no extra cost and that it was the other ingredients that constituted the advertised price.

The head of this roily food manufacture and supply empire may not have looked like he

came from central casting, but with his engorged sense of entitlement and what sections of the press had dubbed his ‘Machiavellian narcissism’, in many other ways he was the perfect poster boy for the selfie/hashtag generation. With pale skin through which you could see the blue of his veins and his watery, unblinking stare, The Moth had a distinctly alien look and a definite air of intrigue about him.

Inevitably, with Esposito’s appointment, the commission, only formed after a court overruled several previous efforts by council leaders to spike it, was itself the subject of questioning. By that November, both the flawed original legislation and the commission itself had fallen with the last of the autumn leaves. Police launched Operation Crispy Crust, carrying out 67 search warrants, ending in 15 arrests. The result was a noticeable (though some suggested temporary) disruption and downsizing of Grupo Bimbo’s supply chain and a loosening of its stranglehold monopoly on the pasta sauce and tomato paste industries.

Somehow managing to escape prosecution on charges of graft and corruption himself,

Esposito succeeded in airing one of the more memorable quotes in the wash-up to the

inquiry into the inquiry when he was heard to remark “Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.” The Supreme Court is still to hear appeals brought forth by Grupo Bimbo’s legal team but it is widely considered they are unlikely to change their minds. As one senator commented –“The happy ending has been delivered and the improper legislation is now a dead animal lying on the bitumen – what I understand in some circles is referred to as ‘road pizza’.”

Glen Donaldson wishes people had a brightness setting and longs to elevate small talk to medium talk.

He is forthcoming in The Bombay Review and Horror After Dark.